


Every Man Needs a Companion

by foxglovves



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (which switches between them), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dirty Talk, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Post-Divorce, Prostitution Roleplay, Size Difference, Size Kink, Unsafe Sex, Wet & Messy, brief mention of Eddie/OMC, light shame kink, mention of Myra-adjacent emotional abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:33:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxglovves/pseuds/foxglovves
Summary: “I’m not a prostitute!” Eddie snaps, landing on that last word a little too loud, enough for one of the other late-night drinkers to glance over at them curiously, but Eddie’s too focused on Richie to tell her to mind her own business. Instead, he grips Richie’s arm, a little tighter–Richie grimaces–and leans in closer.“Well,” Richie says, with a touch of airiness, look-how-funny-I-am. “You haven’t said yes yet.”Eddie narrows his eyes, unamused. “I drive an Escalade.”“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Richie says blandly, like that’s a normal thing to say, like it wouldn’t be absurd for Eddie to indulge in a brief foray into whoring.Wherein Richie meets Eddie at a bar and, with a little liquid courage, propositions him.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 88
Kudos: 705





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: This fic involves two rich/upper middle class guys playing at sex work, so perhaps it goes without saying, but fair warning that neither of them have a particularly nuanced (or accurate) understanding of it.

Eddie’s life, it seems, is a series of befores and afters–each bit of his life parceled out into its own compartment, neat, methodological, just how he likes everything. The bright and brief early years before his father had died. The time he’d spent under his mother’s care, from his childhood to...god, to twenty-five. The years of his marriage, shuttling from Myra to work and then back to Myra again, under her watchful eye just like he’d been under his mother’s, just like he’d been under his father’s, once. 

And now, it’s the _ during _ of a great, new nothing. Eddie is unmoored, drifting through the liminal space of Life Without Myra (And Without Sonia, Too). For the first time in his life that he can remember, he’s a master of his own fate, the road ahead spooling out in front of him as he goes, making things up as he goes along. And as it turns out, well–even without Myra’s supervision, or his mother’s coddling, Eddie isn’t quite a risk taker. Life without Myra means that Eddie can go golfing on Saturdays with his work friends without giving anyone an exact ETA of when he’ll be home, and it means that he can use a straight razor to shave, because there’s no one there to tell him they’ll have a panic attack, watching him use that thing, Eddie, I wish you wouldn’t. It means that sometimes, he goes jogging when it’s still a little bit dark out. And it means that once a week or so he spends a little bit of time in a bar late after work. 

It’s the only thing in his life right now that lingers as a triumphant and probably unhealthy _ fuck you _ to Myra. Myra would _ hate _ that he’s here Thursday nights, hated it when he would drink, even when he’d explained, patiently, that he had to, that he has clients, and that it was part of his job to take them out. Now, he looks forward to it more than he does the weekends. He doesn’t drink much–a beer, maybe two–but it feels good, to be out in the world, quietly observant of it, when he’s spent so much of his life carefully tucked away. 

And the more times he spends there, the less quiet he is. It’s not a hole in the wall–Eddie’s not _ that _ far removed from his comfort zone. It’s neat, clean and well-kept, and it’s seventeen dollars for a cocktail, which means that everyone there is rich or foolish with their money or both. He gets to know the bartender–Chris, a tattooed grad student, somewhere in the weeds of the next great American novel, and he’s working here while he does it. He knows the retired fashion designer in her late sixties who’s there once a month, that her name is Winnie, and that she actually eats the olives in her martinis; to do otherwise would be a waste. He knows the busboy, Will, and he also knows that Chris will occasionally slip him rum and cokes whenever it’s slow. 

Apart from that, and a revolving cast of characters, it’s mostly strangers, and most of the time, they’re uninterested in Eddie, which suits him just fine. He’s busy all day; arguing, emailing, calling, shuttling himself from one meeting to another, leaving signs in the kitchen in order to firmly instruct his colleagues as to how it ought to be cleaned, adding underlines with increasing urgency throughout the week as becomes apparent that his instructions aren’t being heeded, until someone rips off the sign or writes something rude on it.

Here, he’s a guy in a suit up at the bar–one face in a sea of people, or more accurately, a sizeable puddle; the place is not that popular. He knows he’s not half as interesting as, say, the grungy-looking DJ with the undercut in the corner booth, or the guy in the snakeskin jacket flashing hundreds. Comparatively, he’s a square, and normally, unless it’s someone angling for a free drink, no one’s curious about him enough to talk to a stranger, which is just fine by Eddie. He talks plenty outside of the bar. Too much, people have sometimes said about him, absurdly. Everything he says, he has to. No more, no less. Eddie chooses his words carefully–he just happens to choose a lot of them. 

It’s bitterly cold outside tonight, and the bar is half empty, or half full, depending on how one looks at it, and that’s unusual for this hour. It’s the only reason Eddie’s rude enough to sling his coat over the seat next to him, and his jacket; his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. He’s got a beer pressed between his palms, mostly drunk, and he’s pretty good, actually. They’re nearing the end of a busy work week, and Eddie’s got nearly everything checked off his list, and that’s a glorious feeling. On weeks like this, he likes it when it’s a little quiet, like it is now, at least until a stranger stumbles in through the door like a hurricane. 

The stranger on the phone, loudly, in public–something about dates, and cities, and ticket counts–which already makes Eddie hate him, and he slings his jacket halfhazardly across the bartop, which isn’t, like, a _ done _ thing here, and that gets him a second strike for hatred–Eddie’s judgement is as a clear as the frown across his face. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and hardly dressed for the weather in a ratty looking leather jacket, ill-fitting, straining at said shoulders. Barely dressed for _ anything_, Eddie thinks, as he gets an eyeful of the shirt he’s wearing, a button-up with what appear to be either lightning bolts or squiggles frantically zig-zagging their way across his body. And then, the guy looks up to him. 

“Hi!” he says brightly, like he’s here to meet Eddie, which is another _ not done _ thing–to infringe on Eddie’s bubble like they’d been sharing a bubble as soon as he’d set foot in here. Maybe he’d noticed Eddie looking. Eddie casts a skeptical look to Chris–_look at this guy_, he broadcasts, in comradely meanness–but Chris doesn’t seem fazed, and, in a devastating act of betrayal, instead goes to take his order, which technically is well within the bounds of his job but also isn’t very nice of him. “Gimme some whiskey. Well’s fine, whatever you have. On the rocks.” 

It’s a distraction, though, and it means that he’s not paying attention to Eddie anymore, which is just fine by him. Eddie looks down at his phone, intently, like he’s just received important news, and he’s not just tapping _ hello hello hello hello hello _in an attempt to look busy with his fingers. It’s not the success that he hopes it is. At the fringes of his attention, he can tell that the guy is still looking at him from one seat away, curiously, and Eddie hates his shirt with such a sudden and violent intensity that he considers taking a fake phone call so that he can step outside and stop having to look at it. Who wears these sorts of clothes? People who are desperate to be looked at, Eddie thinks, and he’s not going to give him the satisfaction of indulging him. 

(Eddie chooses sensible colors. Muted dark blues and grays–brighter colors when he’s casual, sure, but you can’t possibly do a bright color _ and _ a pattern. The two of them live in a society. There are rules.)

“I'm Richie,” the guy–Richie–offers up. He stretches out a hand to shake; his arms are long, and it’s easy for him, even with the one bar stool’s worth of distance between them.

Eddie eyes the hand, suspiciously, unable to shake the silly sort of thought that he’s making fun of him, which is ridiculous. Worst case scenario, he guesses, this guy is going to try and sell him something, and–well, that’s why he started doing this, right? To see more of the vast and varied array of humankind. Including, tonight, this man in the ugly shirt. 

So: maybe he isn’t fair. “I’m Eddie,” Eddie relents, sliding over a little in order to clasp his hand–he has to stretch, too, to clasp Richie’s hand, big and a little rough, enveloping his stupid little hand with its stubby fingers easily. He has a little bit of a gentle handshake, or maybe _ relaxed _ is the word, because everything about this guy is relaxed; how he sprawls in his seat, leaning hunched over the bar, fidgeting with his whiskey with his other hand. Eddie watches as the ice goes _ clink_, quietly, in the glass. 

“Eddie,” Richie says slowly, feeling it out with his mouth, like he’s never heard of it. _ It’s a common name_, Eddie wants to say, irritated. _ Short for Edward. Lots of people have it. Kings. Talking horses_. Or maybe just the one: horse, singular. Either way, there’s no need to feel it out like he’s doing, slow, like he can taste it on his tongue. And then his thoughts are abruptly disrupted by an absurdity: “Does anyone ever call you Spaghetti?”

Eddie squints. Does anyone ever call him _ Spaghetti_. “Why the fuck would anyone ever do that.”

“I don’t know. It rhymes!” Richie points out cheerfully, by all appearances entirely unbothered by the unimpressed look Eddie gives him.

“Well, _ I _ don’t know,” Eddie says, exasperatedly. “Does anyone ever call you…” Eddie takes a swallow of beer as turns Richie’s name over in his head. _ Richie _ , he thinks. _ Itchy, twitchy, wish he. _ “Bitchy?” he settles on, resigning himself to the indignity of being juvenile. The man–this _ stranger_–had stumbled into Eddie’s bar like a hurricane and settled himself two barstools over before using the word Spaghetti to refer to Eddie, an adult man who pays taxes and has a 401(k). A man who occasionally falls asleep on his couch watching CNN at 10pm. Who does he think he _ is_. 

But even if bitchy isn’t particularly clever or funny, Richie laughs anyway, and scoops up his jacket with one big hand–and then he’s one seat over from Eddie, right next to him, and _ this _ time he bothers to hang his jacket up on the hook by his seat, thank god. He grins at him, and leans in, conspiratory, and says: 

“They call me worse than that.”

His voice is low and husky as he says it, almost like he’s putting on a voice, but–it’s not a voice. Just a lower version of his own voice. Nasal, a little bit of a drawl. Eddie clutches at his beer bottle, ignoring how the coldness seeps into his palms until the ache, and resists the urge to lean back, to put that space back between them, because he’s _ close_, and–now that he’s looking at him close, absurdly enough, he gets a feeling that he used to get when he was a kid, which is: _ I’m going to get in trouble for talking to you_. Which is absurd, obviously. There’s no one on the planet who can punt Eddie into the _ in trouble _ category anymore. His mother is dead; his wife isn’t his wife any more. There’s his boss, maybe, but Eddie’s pretty sure that she has about zero interest in his extracurricular activities, especially after Eddie had nearly started a physical fight at the company barbeque. 

“No shit,” he settles on, finally. 

And then Richie leans back again, and thank god for that. “You come here often?” he asks, after a minute or so. Enough time so that Eddie had been laboring under the conception that he’d decided to leave him be–but apparently not, and finally, Eddie surrenders to the concept that he’s going to have a conversation with this guy. 

“I come here Thursdays. At nine PM,” Eddie recites, robotically. It’s a part of his routine. He _ likes _ his routines–in fact, he writes BAR into his planner, Thursday nights, like he writes GOLF on Saturdays and MEAL PREP on Sunday nights. Calendars aren’t just for reminding people of things and events–Eddie doesn’t need that, not really, he has an excellent memory. He likes his planner because there it is: his life, neatly ordered, meticulously notated, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, highlighted in different colors. When Myra went, for the last time, she’d made another last-ditch effort to keep him. _ What will you do without me, Eddie _ , she’d said, sadly. _ I’m the only one who loves you. I’m everything you have_. 

And she isn’t, Eddie thinks, nastily. She wasn’t. Eddie has a lot of things: he has the bar, now, on Thursdays, he has running three times a week, sometimes he sees a movie, alone, and he _ likes _ it. She had been wrong. He doesn’t have anyone who loves him, but love is a _ want_, not a need, and Eddie has always been practical. It’s something, he’s decided, that he can be frugal with 

“After work?” Richie guesses, and Eddie nods. “That’s cool. What do you do?”

Eddie opens his mouth and pauses, warily, closing it again as he reconsiders. This–he’s pretty sure–is a trap. Richie might not know that it’s a trap, but it’ll become one as soon as he says it, what he does, _ risk analysis_. “I’m not going to tell you,” Eddie announces, and when Richie looks confused, he clarifies. “I think you’re going to be a dick about it.”

“I’m not going to be a dick about it!” Richie protests, with a half smile he can’t quite hold back, but mostly a great deal of bluster, like Eddie’s _ wounded _ him, tremendously, and Eddie smiles too before he remembers not to.

“Yes you are,” he says, tipping his beer bottle towards him, accusatory. “You so _ are_.”

“Tell me,” –and Richie is leaning in again, and Eddie stills this time, rather than lean back to accommodate him, although he clutches his beer–mostly empty–like a life raft, warm from his hands now, sloshing as he tips it back again. Richie, he notes, has long eyelashes, dark like a smudge against his skin. “Tell me how I’m going to be a dick about it.” 

“You’re going to be like–” He pitches his voice up. “Oh, so did you _ apply _ for this job, or are you doing this under duress? Did someone force you to take this job at gunpoint? Is that one of the jobs they tell James Bond to say that he does when he goes through airport security so that everyone’s too bored to ask any second questions–”

Richie laughs, and pauses, and mulls that over for a single humiliating second. “Do you work in insurance?”

Eddie sighs, long-suffering. “Yes.” 

“Oh! That’s...wow,” Richie says, scratching at his chin, genuine curiosity written across his face. Whatever his next line is looks about ready to burst out of him; his lips twitch into a smile, before he carefully smooths his face over and continues on in a hushed tone, awed. “So...they let you use the xerox machine and everything?”

Eddie hides a smile, catches himself before he laughs. Instead, he gives Richie a withering look and downs the rest of his beer. “Fuck you."

Richie breaks into a grin again, and Chris appears at Eddie’s elbow to whisk his beer away and replace it with a gin and tonic, Eddie’s usual second. “I tell jokes for a living,” Richie offers, and Eddie can’t tell if that’s a joke in itself.

“Good ones?”

“Not lately,” Richie says with a shrug. “But I’m working on it.” He might be fucking with him. Eddie can’t tell, generally; he’s mostly checked out of the world of comedy. Occasionally, he puts something on in the background while he works, but comedy is within a lower tier of his preferred background noise, forth or fifth; Bravo, How It’s Made, and Survivor all take precedence. “So every Thursday,” Richie says, toying with his glass again. “Nine PM. Until when?”

“I don’t know,” says Eddie, with a little bit of a careless attitude, an affectation. “Whenever.” Because it’s _ thrilling _ to be able to toss out something like ‘whenever’; it still is, even months after he’d left Myra. Months after he’d had to apologize to the guys from work about having to leave at _ precisely _ eight-thirty because his wife would worry–as though worrying was some sort of temporary state of mind for Myra. She’d worried when he left for work too early. She’d worried when he’d be home too late. She’d worried when he left any of her texts unread for more than five minutes, until he’d finally turned off the read receipts on his phone, the beginning of the end for them. She’s probably worrying about him right now, at her sister’s house in Connecticut. 

“Your wife get pissed?” Richie asks, a little too casually, and Eddie isn’t an idiot, even if he’s a little light-headed from the gin and tonic. He knows what _ that _ means. He’s not wearing a wedding band, and that– _ your wife get pissed? _–isn’t the question that Richie is asking.

It’s not what he’d have forseen for himself, a year ago–spending a Thursday night at a bar getting hit on by a man in a loud shirt and a marked lack of etiquette. Or even what he’d have forseen for himself a week ago. He’s dated a little bit, but never _ organically_; it’s always a friend of a friend, or whoever looks the least like a serial killer on the apps he cycles through. 

But he’s trying to be more spontanous, less structured. Less rigid. And Richie isn’t nearly as terrible as his shirt makes him look, Eddie’s got to admit, with great reluctance. He’s kind of funny, and kind of charming, so:

“I don’t have a wife,” Eddie explains to him. “I’m divorced.”

“Oh,” Richie says, with careful neutrality, inscrutable, enough so that Eddie second guesses himself. “That’s cool. Right?”

Eddie stares, for a second. It’s a weird way to put it, but–well, maybe. Maybe it is. “Yes, it is,” he decides. “It’s very cool.”

It’s cool. He’d thought of it as an absence, at first, a hole through the fabric of his life, jagged and misshapen, and he’d hoped, optimistically, that he’d learn how to live his way around it, like he had when his mom had died, although he’d had Myra as a crutch to lean on then, and now, he has–well, not that much. But enough to make him happy, _ distinctly_, like he’s never been before. 

“Can I ask why?” Richie asks, pulling him out of his thoughts. 

“Why is it cool?” Eddie watches as Richie’s fingers circle the rim of his glass, absently. It’s probably not very sanitary. “Why am I divorced? Which one.”

“I don’t know. Both?”

“It’s cool because I can drop four hundred dollars on a vintage Batman comic and there’s no one there to give me shit about how I spend my money,” Eddis says, and takes a breath, because it’s the second question that’s the hard one. “I got divorced because I've been seeing a therapist for like, ten years but it was all bullshit because she wouldn't let me–she made me like, bring in questions for him to ask me that she'd okayed because she thought I was too emotionally fragile to handle anyone asking me hey, Eddie, why are you living your life like a fucking insane person–and if I was ever an hour past when I said I'd be home, like god forbid I had to meet with a client unexpectedly or something, she'd call the police and try to get them to do a wellness check on me, and all we could ever watch was Bravo TV, which is like, one thing if it's Real Housewives, but when it's fucking Below Deck Mediterranean for four hours straight what the fuck are you supposed to do apart from blow your brains out–”

–and as he’d kept going, it had kept spilling out, and out, and out, before he could stop it, like a deluge, a flood. Until finally he cuts himself off, remembers where he is, who he’s talking to. And Richie’s inscrutable again, but even if Eddie still can’t read him, it’s a different sort of expression that he can’t read. There’s something else there. Maybe a little bit of pity, before just as quickly, Richie composes himself, as though if anything’s going to faze him, it’s not going to be Eddie and his shitty marriage. 

Eddie envies people like that. He’s never had much of a mask. Easy to read, his heart on his sleeve. 

“I mean, to be fair,” Richie offers, breaking the silence, finally. “I’ll give you shit about spending $400 on a Batman comic, and we’ve never been married.”

It’s a tremendous relief, because Eddie’s started to find that look of pity he gets from everyone nauseating, as soon as he says he’s just gotten divorced, the halfhearted rub at his shoulder and meaningless condolences, a sharp reminder of the humiliation of having a public marital implosion at forty. Easier to keep things light, Eddie thinks. Easier to keep things moving. He finishes off his drink before jabbing a finger at him. “It’s my money, and I’ll spend it how I want to, so fuck you and fuck off.”

Richie doesn’t fuck off. “What kind of comic book is worth four hundred dollars?” He scratches at his chin, contemplative. “Batman better be like, balls deep in Spider-Man by the third page–

Eddie groans, making a face. “Batman’s not gay, and that’s disgusting, Spider-Man’s in _ high _ school, and there’s the whole Marvel/DC thing–”

“Oh.” Richie winces, and to his credit, he looks genuinely chagrined. “Whoops! Sorry, I don’t keep track of the ages or the sex lives of fictional superheroes.” He waggles his eyebrows, drops his voice again. “I have enough trouble keeping track of my _ own _ sex life.”

“Right,” Eddie says. He’s not going to ask. He _ won’t_. But he wonders, kind of, as his eyes drift down from the curve of Richie’s jaw to his broad shoulders, down to his hands. Bigger than Eddie’s. Someone who had enough courage to pepper a complete stranger with questions over the course of–god, has it been an hour?–an hour probably has the right amount of confidence to get laid on a semi-regular basis. And he’s good-looking, obviously. Not clean-cut enough to be Eddie’s type, but he’s _ someone’s _ type, probably. At least, Eddie would guess. 

“Really,” Richie says casually, like he’d known that Eddie wouldn’t ask. “_That _ must be a cool part of divorce, anyway. For you.”

Eddie’s cowardice hadn’t earned him an elaboration on Richie’s, er, activities, but it _ had _ earned him the sort of probing question–albeit implied–that he’d have taken issue with, had he not already spilled his guts for this guy plenty over the course of the hour. Like he hadn’t consumed one beer and two gin and tonics over the course of the hour. God, was it two? When had that happened? Eddie squints into his half-empty glass as he speaks. 

“Not really,” he says. “This online dating stuff–it sucks. We didn’t have any of that before I got married, and now it’s like, you answer _ what’s your favorite color_, and _ would you rather save 40 babies or 10 children from a burning building_, and somehow that makes the algorithm spit out, like, here’s a guy for you to sit across from awkwardly and talk about the weather before parting ways like _ this was so cool, we should do this again_. And then one of you ignores the other until the other guy gets the hint.”

Eddie has been the ignorer, mostly–well, not being completely fair here. There have been a good five or six who have checked all the boxes, and a few more who have gotten close. He’s not being too picky, either; it’s things like _ not crazy _ and _ employed _ that he’s looking for, and maybe _ looks like he might know how to iron clothes_. _ Organizes his socks by color_. _ Can dry-swallow a multivitamin without puking. Certified in CPR _. Normal stuff. 

Oh, and tall, but Eddie isn’t going to think much on how much he likes tall when tall is, presently, one bar stool away. 

“The weather?” Richie whistles. “Easy, tiger. So you’re saying you haven’t gotten laid at all?”

“That’s–” Eddie goes a little stiff, defensive, and Richie grins, like that’s a gotcha. “That’s none of your business,” he finishes, primly. 

Richie’s grin widens. “So you’re saying you have.”

Eddie has. A few times, and it’s been–well, it had been exploratory at first, like, _ can I do this _ , after the twenty-year hiatus he’d had in doing anything with a guy, markedly far out at age 40 from all of the drunken fumblings with the college roommate he’d hated. And it had been touch and go, but he’d been able to work out that he _ could_, if he wanted to, and he’s gotten to the point now that the question is if he _ should_, a question that had come to mind during his last encounter. Another one of Eddie’s types on-paper–tall, blond, military guy, a little cold like a shark. And as he’d hunched over Eddie, thrusting away, Eddie had stared up at the ceiling and it had occurred to him that jerking off would probably be easier. Easier to clean up, at least. And it hadn’t been _ bad _ sex, per se, but–okay sex. Just fine sex. Nothing to write home about. 

“What the fuck is your situation, anyway?” Eddie asks, after a pause, because he can’t keep himself from doing it. “Are you married?”

Richie laughs. “No way, dude. Who has time for that? It’s 2019. We’re all going to live in, like, polyandrous quadruples in like five years anyway. I’m just practicing for it.”

Eddie pauses, contemplative. “That’s kind of sad,” he ventures, before he can stop himself, and flushes pink when that earns him another laugh from Richie, this time derisive. 

“What, that I actually _ fuck_?” Richie asks, leaning in heavy on an elbow, close to Eddie again, leaning on the word _ fuck _that makes it sound gross and lurid. 

“No!” Eddie protests, exasperatedly. “I mean–the point of all of it should be, like, um. You know. To find your person. The one.”

It sounds profoundly silly, said out loud, and it’s not the kind of thing that Eddie frequently finds himself within the habit of saying, but he’s feeling a little bit tipsy and a little bit unguarded. It’s something that he finds himself thinking about, recently, in passing moments, touch and go–when he sees an old couple bickering over cans of soup at the grocery store, or two teenagers buying tickets to the movies, the nervous first-date energy practically radiating off of them. He’d never had anything like that with Myra. Myra had been _ safe_, _ familiar _ in a way that he’s not too keen on unpacking now or within the next six months of therapy–and now, he can’t help but wonder what it would be like. 

Richie studies his face, like he’s seeing something that Eddie isn’t intending to broadcast. His jaw is so square, he thinks, stupidly. Like Batman. 

“That’s cute,” Richie decides, finally, and Eddie goes pinker, flushing with anger at being made a mockery of. 

“Don’t be an asshole,” he hisses, shoulders stuff with tension, and Richie’s hands go up, like Eddie is a spooked horse. 

“No, I mean–maybe it is,” Richie says hastily, and he sounds a little guilty, even, which makes this even more of an embarrassment. _ You’re so sensitive, Eddie_, Myra says in his head, equal parts cloying and reproachful. “Maybe you’re right! Maybe _ I’m _ right. Who knows. I can’t tell you how to live your life, but maybe it’s worth playing the field, a little bit? Before you find your one true love? Do some crazy shit, you know, for once. I mean, you look like you fuck in the missionary position in the dark in your like, Mormon underthings, lest Jehova catch you doing a sin, or whatever.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Oh, right. Thanks. What kind of crazy shit? I’m _ forty_. I have high blood pressure.”

“I don’t know. That’s up to you, man. Whatever, you know, gets your goat.”

“That’s not–that’s not what that phrase _ means_,” Eddie mutters. “Get your goat means something completely different. My goat has nothing to do with this.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Richie says, cocking his head. “Something that feels wrong, but not like–oh, this is wrong. Like, _ oh_. This is _ wrong_.”

Eddie knits his eyebrows together and mulls this over. He goes to take a drink from his glass, but it’s all ice, melted enough so that it sloshes as he swallows the bit of water that it’s left. He wonders, absently, if alcohol, like soda, leaves you thirsty and thirstier the more that you drink it. 

But it’s too long of a silence, apparently, because Richie continues on with a shrug. “I mean, nevermind. It doesn’t really matter. It all ends in the same way, right? Fuck however you is that you want to fuck.” 

Richie doesn’t mean to bait him, Eddie is pretty sure, but it rankles nonetheless. Richie doesn’t know him, he thinks, irritably. He’s just met him; he hasn’t learned enough about him to decide whether he’s some sort of repressed square or not. 

Impulsively, he stabs at Richie’s chest with a finger, and it’s the first contact they’ve had since Richie shook his hand when they’d started, and he watches Richie _ know _ that, imagines that he can feel his pulse quicken under his fingertip where he has him pinned by the sternum, feels his own pulse thrum in response. It’s the first thing he’s done that’s thrown Richie off, genuinely, and it takes a second for Eddie to remember what he’d been going to say. “You don’t know the first thing about how I fuck,” he says to break the silence.

Richie’s eyes bore into his own, wide behind his glasses, until that veil goes up again, that easy smile, and Richie leans into that touch, until it ought to hurt. “I can make an educated guess,” Richie says, and Eddie snatches his hand back like he’s been burned. 

***

But it’s easier after that, and they drink some more–now that they’ve broken that barrier of physical contact. Eddie reaches out to rub at his shoulder in mock sympathy when Richie jokes; Richie ruffles Eddie’s hair, even, and laughs when it earns him a shove. It’s more drunk than Eddie usually gets, and that’s his own fault; he’s a lightweight and he _ knows _ it, usually, anyway. They drink late into the night, in fact, through the thick of the after-work crowd, if one could call it that, until they’re one of a handful of stragglers, including a woman in a silver dress weeping in the corner, her friend tapping at her phone next to her, clearly unimpressed. Eddie theorizes that someone’s just broken up with her. Richie thinks that she’s just committed a murder.

There’s a point at which it’s time to go, though, lest this turn into something it shouldn’t be, Eddie thinks. Richie wants him to stay, and protests, loudly. Eddie knows he shouldn’t. He tells him–not untruthfully–what happens when he doesn’t get his eight hours of sleep a night, how easily he loses his fucking mind, and Richie teases him about that, and Eddie puts up a big show of being offended, and–

–and Eddie is happy, arguing with this stranger in a bar, actually. Arguing with Richie in this bar. It’s nice. So nice that he almost feels bad to ask for the check, and maybe he’s reading into this wrong, but it feels like Richie feels bad about it, too. 

Eddie also feels bad when he reaches for his wallet and it isn’t there. 

“Oh, fuck.” Instantly, Eddie flashes back to his office. He’d taken it out at the end of the day–his coworker Will had bet him $2.00 he couldn’t successfully pitch a crumpled up budget sheet into the recycling bin from forty paces, and he’d been right. Eddie had taken it out to begrudgingly dole out his earnings, and...and it’s definitely still sitting on the divider by Will’s cubicle. “_Shit_.”

Richie hasn’t asked for his own bill; Eddie didn’t ask, but he’s pretty sure he plans on camping out here for the night. He sets his drink down with a frown. “What?”

“I left my wallet at work.” Helplessly, Eddie does another patdown of each of his pockets, uselessly, like one does when they’re 100% certain that what one is looking for is nowhere near said pockets. “Fuck. God, I never do this. In fact, I’ve _ never _ done it–” 

“I’ll cover it.” Richie’s already taking out his wallet, and Eddie holds up a hand in protest, already, before he even asks. “It’s cool. How much?”

It’s a lot, Eddie thinks, glancing over to his bill. Eighty-five and change–they’ve been there for ages, and it wouldn’t be right to put that on Richie. It wouldn’t be right, to be indebted to him like that. Eddie’s gaze flicks back up to Richie, and he finds him studying him, thoughtfully, in a manner that Eddie resents, frankly, and he straightens. “No,” he says hastily. “I don’t need–it’s fine.”

It is fine. Eddie comes here all the time; he’ll tell Chris he forgot his wallet and nip out and get it, and then come back. “C’mon. Don’t be like that,” Richie says, coaxingly. “Let me pay. You can pay me back. Or not, I don’t give a fuck–we can, like, do the barter thing. Risk assess me.”

“What? That’s not how it works, clearly you don’t even know what that _ is_.”

“Mow my lawn?”

“Clearly, you’re not from around here, if you have a lawn.”

He’s looking up to catch Chris’s attention when, all of a sudden, Richie catches his wrist–not gently, not roughly, but firmly. And as Eddie looks over into his face, perplexed, he’s surprised to find...something he hasn’t seen yet, so plainly. A little bit of nervousness, like he’s doing something impulsive. And under that, a little bit of hunger. 

“Fine then,” Richie says, his voice low. “That offer is off the table. How much is it? Two hundred? I’ll give you two hundred if you let me fuck you.”

Eddie blinks, and Eddie stares. At first he thought he’s misheard him. “What?” he asks, stupidly.

“You heard me,” Richie says, like he isn’t concerned that Eddie will punch him. Easy, quiet and confident. “Two hundred.”

Eddie flushes, he’s pretty sure, straight down to his chest and up to the tips of his ears, and looks back at Chris hastily before leaning in close to Richie again. “That’s not funny,” he hisses. “_ So _ not funny. What the fuck, Richie.” 

“I’m not joking,” Richie says, and from the look on his face, god, Eddie’s pretty sure that he isn’t. 

“I’m not a _ prostitute_!” Eddie snaps, landing on that last word a little too loud, enough for one of the other late-night drinkers to glance over at them curiously, but Eddie’s too focused on Richie to tell her to mind her own business. Instead, he grips Richie’s arm, a little tighter–Richie grimaces–and leans in closer. 

“Well,” Richie says, with a touch of airiness, look-how-funny-I-am. “You haven’t said yes yet.” 

Eddie narrows his eyes, unamused. “I drive an Escalade.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Richie says blandly, like that’s a normal thing to say, like it wouldn’t be absurd for Eddie to indulge in a brief foray into whoring. Like Eddie _ needs _ two hundred dollars. He’s wearing a pair of Gucci loafers; he’s not wanting for money. He’d forgotten his wallet at the office, true, but–even if that’s annoying, it’s not the end of the world. 

“That’s not–” Eddie begins, exasperatedly, before breaking off lest they go in circles. “Okay, genius. Like, where would we even do this? You think I’d bring you back to my apartment? I barely know you.”

“_ That’s _ the issue?” Richie laughs, delighted. “Not I barely know you so I shouldn’t let you put your _ dick _ in me?” Eddie shushes him at _ dick _ , glances around hastily, but–as he does it, there’s a throb of something, somewhere, a shiver that crawls down his spine. Richie putting his dick in him. He’s a little drunk, isn’t he–because he would have to be, to be even _ entertaining _ this sort of debate, will Eddie or will Eddie not prostitute himself. He ought to have stormed out give minutes ago. “There’s a hotel down the street,” Richie explains, patiently. “I’ll get a room. All you have to do is say yes.”

Eddie narrows his eyes. 

“You’ve gotta pay your bill, man,” Richie says, softly. 

Eddie swallows. Hesitates. “Two hundred isn’t even a lot,” he offers, after that pause. 

Richie cocks his head, mulls that over. “Okay,” he says, finally, reaching up to scratch at his chin. “Two fifty."

“That’s not–I wasn’t trying to bargain,” Eddie protests. “I was just saying!”

“Then two hundred.”

This is absurd. This is fucking insane, is what it is, Eddie thinks, shouts at Richie in his head. Eddie is a businessman–respected in his craft, well-established. Forty years old. Until recently, straight, or at least blissfully ignorant to the concept of his being anything otherwise. He doesn’t need two hundred dollars to sleep with someone. He might drop two hundred on dinner with a _ date _ , if the algorithm had determined that he ought to be invested in someone enough, but that’s not prostitution; that’s a social contract, an _ if/then_. It’s not a stranger proposing that he have sex with Eddie a handful of hours after meeting him, for cash–

–but he hadn’t said _ have sex_, had he, Eddie thinks. He’s said _ fuck_, coarse and rough. _ If you let me fuck you_–like it’s a favor that Eddie’s going to let him do, like Richie is desperate enough to sink to this sort of low, paying someone for sex, like Eddie is desperate enough to allow him to pay for it. 

Eddie swallows. 

Eddie thinks, and Eddie considers. He’d said before that he knew how Eddie fucked, and that worries at him, now. He’s probably proposing this because he thinks Eddie is a square; that Eddie will reject him, outright, that this is far too far-flung from his concept of Eddie as a sexual being–missionary in the dark, even if this is Eddie’s time to be taking risks, experimenting, trying different things, freshly freed from the confines of the wife and the picket fence and the one-and-a-half kids he and Myra had never–thank god–gotten around to have. 

“Three hundred,” he says, before he can stop himself, and it’s for a number of reasons. 

It’s because he’s not with Myra anymore, firstly. _ Myra’s _ Eddie is cautious, fearful, and prudent. Myra’s Eddie drives like he has a death wish, racing home so that he can go home and hide away from the rest of the world. Myra’s Eddie skips out on a company retreat upstate because it’s hours away from the hospital, Eddie, and spouses aren’t invited, and what if something _ happens _, what if he has a reaction. And Eddie now–he’s different. He still speeds, but he drinks in bars, and he goes on dates, and he tried rock climbing a few weeks ago, and it had been a good workout. 

It’s like a shitty version of Goofus and Gallant, Eddie thinks, absurdly. Goofus stays home from work because the guy in the office next to him has a cold. Gallant agrees to have sex with a stranger in a bar for three hundred dollars. Or maybe it’s the reverse. 

Three hundred dollars–that is, if Richie agrees to it. And for a second, Eddie thinks that he won’t–that he’ll _ laugh_, maybe, that Eddie will feel like an idiot for falling for this, but he doesn’t laugh. He looks–kind of startled, actually. Like he hadn’t thought that he would get that far. “Deal,” Richie scrambles to say, and Eddie releases the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. 

God. He’s fucking insane. The _ both _of them are, actually–and Eddie especially ought to know better. “I need a hundred,” Eddie says, like it’s a challenge. Like they’re playing chicken, here, which maybe they are. “To pay the bill.” A hundred to prove that this is real, that he’s not fucking with him, like he won’t laugh and clap Eddie on the shoulder and tell him god, he thought he was serious.

“Fine,” Richie says, and now that he says it, as he fumbles for his wallet, Eddie can see a little bit of that nervous energy crackling under his skin, even if he’s much better at hiding it than Eddie is. He presents Eddie with a fistful of cash. “You can have, like, a...what’s it called. A down payment.”

Eddie makes a face, taking it in his hand. Five twenties–a little crumpled, and just like that, this is real. It’s a little terrifying; a little exhilarating, and he’s flushed as he turns his attention to the check, palms sweating. He’d known that life after divorce would involve new things, he tells himself. Risks. Pushing himself outside of his comfort zone. And that’s what this is, isn’t it? Something new. Something–like Richie had said–wrong, just a little bit.

“That’s what you put down on a house,” Eddie informs him, sourly. “Not a hooker.” He tucks the twenties in the check and shuts it. 


	2. Chapter 2

“One room for tonight, please,” Richie says, sliding his card across to the clerk, who glances at Eddie as Eddie lingers behind him. He wonders, though, what she’s thinking, as his eyes linger on Richie’s broad shoulders as he leans against the counter. There’s no chance that she thinks that Richie is paying him to let him fuck him, obviously–Eddie, in his suit and with his briefcase in hand, doesn’t seem like the type. Maybe she thinks that they’re having some sort of sordid affair. Or maybe (more likely) she’s not thinking about the two of them at all, beyond whether Richie’s paying Visa or Amex, although he can see her relax a little as Richie flashes her a grin and gives her a little bit of small talk as they wait for the transaction to go through. 

Eddie hovers behind him, standing stiffly like a besuited mannequin. He feels like he could jump out of his skin. They hadn’t talked much on the walk over, but it had been an _ excited _sort of silence, a mutual understanding of the fact that they were both going to do something faintly absurd together. 

He’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a wave of horror to wash over him, but it hasn’t hit him quite yet. He’ll probably say something like _ I should go_, or _ this isn’t like me_, or _ I think we’re making a mistake_, except he already knows that this is an objective mistake, going up to a hotel room with a strange man. He doesn’t need to say it out loud to know it. He absently wonders if he’s going to get murdered, and how he might defend himself if Richie tries to do it. Eddie _ is _ a yellow belt in karate–he’d gotten that far aged twelve before his mother had made him stop. It’s the second level, which technically speaking means that he’s twice as skilled as a white belt is. 

“Off we go,” Richie says, holding up the keycard triumphantly, like they’re going to the zoo or something. Not like they’re going up to a hotel room to have sex, as Eddie’s mind helpfully reminds him, every five seconds as they cross the lobby, cutting through where the continental breakfast will be served tomorrow to get to the elevator, and thank god it’s a slow night, because Eddie has no interest in standing in an enclosed space with, say, a family of four in town to visit Grandma while he and Richie head up to their room together. 

(To have sex, his mind points out again, just in case he’d forgotten it, and Eddie swats the thought away frantically like a gnat.) 

They step inside. Per their room key, they’re headed for the top floor. Eddie thumbs the button before Richie can and takes a step back to peer at the little panel with the floor numbers as one does in an elevator, and Richie asks him when the last time he’d had sex was. 

“What?” he asks, politely. 

“When was the last time you–y’know.” Eddie watches with a resigned air as Richie crudely does the finger-in-circled-finger gesture. “Did it.”

Richie wants him to be scandalized–to hotly tell him that it’s none of his _ business_, so that Richie can get in a dig about how now isn’t the time to be a prude. And suddenly, Eddie doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction. “A guy on an app. Like two weeks ago,” he says instead, with forced nonchalance, crossing his arms as he meets Richie’s gaze. He can do this too, he thinks, as the elevator _ pings _ faintly in the background, lurching into motion. 

Richie isn’t thrown. “Any good?” he asks. 

“He made me come,” Eddie says bluntly, giving it another try, and at least that gets him something–Richie shifting from foot to foot, reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck. Not a nervous fidget, but a fidget nonetheless, and a pause before he answers. _ Ping _. “Is that what you’re asking?”

“It wasn’t,” Richie says, and maybe he does sound a little bit hoarse, although it might be Eddie’s imagination. _ Ping_. “But good to know.”

“Is it?” Eddie asks, emboldened. “Isn’t it supposed to be about what’s good for _ you_? You’re buying. That’s how that this works."

“It would be good for me if I could make you come,” Richie says, and Eddie goes red, his gaze snapping back to the elevator panel. They lapse into silence. _ Ping. _

***

It’s a nice room, and Eddie wonders how much he paid for it, and then if _ he’d _ been worth more or less than this nice hotel room. He can’t even remember the price they’d set, truthfully, which probably means that he’s not very good at this, but that isn’t surprising. 

“Half up front,” Eddie says, impulsively, as Richie shrugs his jacket off and tosses it–_ugh_–to land in a crumple on the chair. He looks back at him, a little surprised. 

“I gave you a hundred at the restaurant already,” Richie says, even as he pulls his wallet out, returning to Eddie at the door. He stands close as he rifles through his wallet for the extra fifty and passes it over to him obediently. 

Eddie takes his time to count it, slowly, heart pounding as he makes himself focus. Ten, ten, five, ten, five, five, some ones. Bill by bill. Richie’s close enough so that he can feel the heat coming off of him–an indication that someone’s edging in on his personal space, something that enrages him, usually, particularly on the subway. It doesn’t bother him now. 

“Can I kiss you now,” Richie says in a rush, and Eddie nods just as quickly, and then Richie _ is _ kissing him, ducking his head to make up for the height difference as he steers him back with a broad hand cupping his side, over his ribs.

It’s a few inches before Eddie’s back hits the door. Richie tastes like the beer he’d been drinking at the bar; he smells like cheap shampoo and–faintly–cigarette smoke, although he doesn’t taste like that, thank god. It’s not the best kiss Eddie’s had, technically speaking, but it’s perhaps the hungriest, clumsy and hot and eager, Eddie’s fistful of cash digging into both of their chests where it’s crushed between them, forgotten but _ there _nonetheless. 

He’d met him a few hours ago, that voice at the back of Eddie’s head points out as Richie slots a knee between his thighs, nudging them apart, and Eddie obliges, arching up greedily for that bit of contact. This isn’t smart or safe. If Myra could see him now–

“Hold on,” Richie says hoarsely, pulling back. “Fuck.”

“What?” Eddie asks, a little irritated by the tease. He’s not _ hard _ hard, but he’s well on his way there, enough so that he’s not entirely indignant at the prospect of rutting up against Richie’s thigh like a dog.

“No, it’s just–” Richie scrubs at his face, and Eddie’s heart begins to sink. _ We shouldn’t do this_. _ This is a mistake. _“You’re really hot,” he says instead, helplessly.

Eddie squints. It’s not what he’d been expecting. “What?” he repeats. 

“You’re really hot,” Richie repeats. “I just, uh. I’ve been wanting this all night, gimme a sec.”

Eddie’s eyes drop. Richie’s _ hard _ hard, ready to go, already–and Eddie knows that he’d wanted him, more or less, but Eddie’s never been wanted like that, _ three hundred dollars _ wanted, hard as soon as they get in the door wanted.

Eddie pockets his money, and wets his lips. 

“You wanna fuck me that bad, huh?” he asks, face burning as he says it, voice low and hoarse nonetheless. Richie’s eyes snap back up to his own and he opens his mouth and closes again, speechless for what feels like the first time that evening. 

Emboldened, Eddie takes a step forward, pressing the tips of his fingers into Richie’s chest–and keeps walking, making Richie stumble back, back, back until the backs of his knees hit the bed, and he sits. 

(_Point_: Eddie ought to wash his hands after handling that money if they’re going to be probing anyplace intimate, and Richie ought to too for the same reasons. Eddie also ought to do the same once-over of the bedsheets that he tends to do when he travels for business, because usually, they’re filthy. 

_ Counterpoint_: Richie is big, and broad, and Eddie had steered him back to the bed, just like that, and stepping away to wash his hands might distract him from that fact.)

“Yeah,” Richie says, finally, like he’s just remembered how to speak. “I do.”

“Yeah?” Eddie says stupidly, having run out of dirty talk for the moment–he doesn’t _ do _ this–and Richie reaches up to settle a hand on his waist so that he can urge him in closer. His grip is like iron; Eddie has no choice, even when he loses his balance a little, and he’s made to steady himself against Richie’s shoulder. 

“And I paid for it,” Richie continues. “So why don’t you take your clothes off. So I can see what I’m paying for.”

He releases him. Eddie stumbles back, putting a little bit of distance between the two of them, drinking in the sight of Richie there in his stupid shirt on the probably-filthy hotel bed, eyes fixed on Eddie like he’s a porn star and not a forty-year-old risk assessor with shin splints and (occasionally) night sweats. He reaches up to unknot his tie clumsily. 

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Eddie says, as he does what he’s telling him to do. “Asshole.”

Richie leans back against the bed and flashes him a grin. “The customer’s always right, buddy,” he remarks, loftily. “I’m calling the shots here.”

_ This time_, Eddie thinks mutinously as he briskly unbuttons his shirt with sharp, jerky movements, too focused on the task at hand to unpack what the prospect of a potential _ next time _ might mean. He wriggles his way out of his shirt, a little gingerly. “The customer’s annoying,” he mutters. Richie laughs. 

“Watch it. All of this is going in your Yelp review–hey. Where are you going?”

Eddie, midway to the closet to retrieve a hanger, gives him a bemused look over his shoulder. “I have to hang it up! _ Yelp _ review, god.”

“Just–c’mere. Leave it. Put it on the chair.”

“Do I look like I’m insane?” Eddie says sharply. “Do I look like I’m an animal? It’ll wrinkle.”

It only takes a second, anyway. He toes off his shoes, peels off his socks, unzips his trousers with brisk, businesslike efficiency and hangs them up too. When he turns back to Richie, Richie’s drinking in the sight of him so hungrily that he flushes–down to his chest, Richie can see, probably–somewhere between self-conscious and pleased. He reaches to hook his thumbs in the waistband of his boxer-briefs; red, high quality stuff. It’s worth it, the indulgence of expensive underpants. He’s really always thought so. 

“Leave those,” Richie says, a little hoarsely. “Come here.”

This time Eddie obeys. He comes to stand in front of Richie–who’s still dressed, who still looks the same way that he did when he’d walked into the bar that evening. Richie reaches up to cup Eddie by the jaw, and drags his thumb across a cheekbone, thumbing his lower lip before his hand trails down to the curve of his neck, and then his throat, where he can feel as Eddie swallows hard. 

It’s like he’s trying to learn him by feel. His hand is cold as it pauses somewhere around Eddie’s sternum, palm flat against the sparse hairs there, where he can probably feel Eddie’s heart thudding in his chest. A little fast. Eddie’s pretty sure he has tachycardia, and he wonders distractedly if Richie can tell, but if he can, he doesn’t comment. Instead, Richie’s hand slips down to the flat pane of his stomach, lingering there for a moment before the other one comes up to settle on his hips with its pair. 

With the last guy Eddie had fucked, they’d kissed in the bedroom in the dark, twice, and that had been the last thing approaching eye contact that had occurred during that particular encounter. Eddie had wondered at the time if he’d been thinking about someone else, and at the time, he hadn’t really minded. 

He’s not sure how this feels in comparison. A little humiliating, maybe, like he’s being inspected, but in a way that makes him shiver, or maybe that’s Richie’s cold hands. And a little like he’s being cared for, which he ought to resent, because he doesn’t like being fussed over, doesn’t like where it leads. But this is alright, inexplicably.

“You’re so little,” Richie mumbles, half to himself, which scatters his thoughts completely. 

“_Hey _,” Eddie snaps, going tense, and Richie blinks, startled, like he’d forgotten that Eddie was there. 

“No, no, no, I mean, like–little and strong,” Richie hastens to explain, peering up to meet his eyes. “You could probably kick my ass.” There’s a pause. Richie opens his mouth and closes it, clearly reconsidering, a wise choice until he throws caution to the wind and re-reconsiders. “Or my _ shins_, at least–”

“_Uuuugh_,” Eddie groans, shoving at Richie’s face; he can feel him grin underneath his palm. “Shut up. Shut the fuck up. I’m not that little, I’m like five nine, it’s _ average _.” 

“If you say so. _ I _ think it’s cute,” Richie says, and before Eddie can object to that he pats at Eddie’s hip dismissively. “On the bed you go.”

“You’re not gonna…” Eddie drops his hand to tug at the collar of Richie’s shirt. “You know.” Undress, he means. 

“Nope,” Richie says, leaving at it at that. 

Eddie frowns. “I want to see you.”

“Buyer’s rules,” Richie says with a careless shrug, and Eddie knows that he could probably push it, but he doesn’t. Instead, he sighs. 

“Your shirt is a total boner killer. Just so you know,” Eddie grumbles as he does as he’s told, resisting the urge to peel back the bedspread to inspect what’s underneath, even though he ought to. Hotel rooms are, on average, disgusting. He’s spent plenty of time in them–usually nice ones like these, the occasional trashy one back when he’d worked for a smaller company. Never like this, for this purpose, though, that purpose being to prostitute himself. 

“Doesn’t look like it,” Richie points out, with a waggle of his eyebrows, toeing off his shoes–thank god–and jostling the mattress a little bit as he moves to join Eddie where he lies with his head against the pillow. It’s to kiss him, as it turns out, cupping his jaw with a gentleness that’s surprising. He reaches down to cup Eddie through his briefs as he does and Eddie groans into his mouth, hips jerking up reflexively. Somewhere between the door and the once-over he’d given him at the foot of the bed Eddie had gone from _ interested _ to _ very interested _ , physiologically, and that bumps to _ extremely fucking interested _as Richie continues to work him with the heel of his palm, just enough so that Eddie has to work to get what he wants from it.

It’s gross. Eddie doesn’t like getting his clothes dirty–he _ hates _ it–and he ought to hate this, too, the wet patch of precome that starts to bleed through the fabric to the heat of Richie’s palm, how his underwear sticks to the head of his cock underneath. Disgusting, he thinks hazily, even as he grinds up into Richie’s touch, again, again, again. 

“Your boner seems fine to me, dude,” Richie points out once he pulls back a little, and Eddie would probably kick him if it didn’t mean that his hand would move. “I think you’re _ into _ the shirt.”

“Your shirt sucks,” Eddie gasps, reaching down to fumble with the button to Richie’s jeans with clumsy fingers. Good news: Richie’s boner, coincidentally, also appears to be fine, from what he can tell, although the jeans are probably uncomfortable in the state that he’s in. “I hate it. Who sold it to you?” He kisses him again as he unzips him. “You ought to prosecute them.”

“I-I, uh. Can’t remember!” Richie manages as Eddie pulls his cock out. “Can we, uh, revisit this after you get your hand on my dick–”

Richie is packing heat, as it turns out, big and thick. Eddie bites his lip as he gives it an experimental stroke, and Richie groans, cursing under his breath, as he reaches back to pull out his wallet, which is a little strange. 

Eddie pauses, frowning. “Are you, like, going to give me a _ tip_? This isn’t pay as you go.” 

“More than a _ tip_!” Richie exclaims as soon as Eddie’s finished, clearly delighted that Eddie’s given him a joke to deliver on a silver platter, even if Eddie’s got his hand wrapped around his cock. It’s some sachets of lube that Richie retrieves from his wallet, which makes more sense. Richie continues to hunt around for something, though, long enough so that Eddie releases him to regard him with a mounting suspicion. 

Richie pauses, finally, and frowns. “Um.”

Eddie’s starting to get a sinking feeling. “What.”

“You got a condom?” Richie asks, hopefully, and Eddie groans, rolling over onto his back. 

“_No, _ I don’t have a condom,” he hisses. “I just came from work. I can’t bring a condom to work.”

“Oh, fuck,” Richie says, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair hastily, the most frazzled that Eddie has seen him thus far. “Fuck. Okay. Um. I can, uh, call down to the lobby–”

“_No _ ,” Eddie protests, already thinking of the girl at the front desk Richie had made small talk with, thinking of what the look on her face would be once Richie calls down to ask for a condom, please–why? So that he could have sex with that guy he’d been with, _ you _ know, average height, dark hair, in the suit, name of Eddie Kaspbrak. Yes, that’s K-A-S-P-B-R-A-K.

Richie folds his hands over his chest and peers up at the ceiling, the two of them lapsing into silence as they each attempt to problem-solve. It’s ten seconds or so before Richie glances back over to Eddie, cautiously. “What if we just…” he ventures, with a touch of hopefulness. 

Eddie shuts his eyes, reaches up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “We shouldn’t.” God, he’s so fucking hard. 

“I’m clean,” Richie says halfheartedly, clearly not intending to push it.

“_I’m _ clean. But…”

“Wait!” Richie exclaims, fumbling for–his phone, as it turns out? He pulls up his email, scrolls through to find something. “I have...I got tested. Two weeks ago. I do it every six months, I’ve never had anything. Here, look.”

This is awfully convenient, Eddie thinks distractedly, as Richie thrusts his phone into his hands, but it’s just as Richie described, and–and Eddie is really hard, and he wants this so badly. He’s made a series of poor decisions tonight, and, truthfully, he’s still a little buzzed. Buzzed enough to blame this decision on the alcohol tomorrow, anyway. Eddie sighs, and tosses Richie’s phone back to him; it hits his chest with a muted _ thwap_, and Richie clutches at it. 

Now Eddie has a little argument in his head with himself. It takes twenty seconds or so, and the victor wins by a landslide. 

“It’s extra for bare,” he says finally, resigned. Richie lights up. 

He hunts through his wallet, biting his lip in concentration in a way that shouldn’t be hot–but is, nonetheless. “I think I have ten bucks left? You cleaned me out.”

“Fine,” Eddie groans, taking Richie’s wallet from him and tossing it to the side so that he can pull him in by his shirt. “Whatever.”

They kiss again. He’ll have beard burn from all this kissing, probably–Richie is due for a shave, but it’s worth it, Eddie likes him this way, stubbly and vaguely unkempt, although he wouldn’t admit it. He can feel Richie smile against his mouth before he pulls back to speak.

“Ten bucks to raw dog you. What a deal,” Richie says in a low voice as he pushes Eddie back against the bed. He delivers the rest low into Eddie’s ear, propping himself up on top of him, fitting himself in between Eddie’s thighs. “Can I come inside you, Eddie?” he murmurs. “Do you want me to?”

Eddie makes a face, but he can _ feel _ his dick throb, the traitor. “I-I guess so,” he says, with as much nonchalance as he can manage, which isn’t much. He doesn’t let that happen usually–it’s a bitch to clean up, Eddie’s discovered–but he wants Richie to mess him up. It’s obvious, apparently, because Richie laughs, already ripping open two of the sachets so that he can get his fingers slick, moving down to get himself settled. 

He uses too much, Eddie thinks, watching hazily as Richie reaches up with his other hand to tug Eddie’s briefs down and off, finally. He gets it on the bed, on the sheets, too, and the excess drips down his palm as he works his fingers into him–two from the get-go, which is a little bit much, but still well within the bounds of _ good _ too much _ , _so that suits Eddie fine in theory, although a wince flickers across his face. Richie pauses. 

“What?”

“Big fingers,” Eddie manages, strangled. 

“That’s what they call me. Richie ‘Big Fingers’ To…” Richie, two fingers deep, pauses in contemplation. “Am I not supposed to say my last name? Does that ruin the whole conceit of this thing–”

“Shut up,” Eddie bites out, and as it turns out, that had been a good idea, because Richie decides to interpret that particular command literally and put Eddie’s dick in his mouth. 

He looks good sucking cock, Eddie thinks a little dazedly. He still has his glasses on, and Eddie doesn’t want to come this way, but–under another circumstance, he knows where he’d want to. He reaches down to cup Richie’s jaw as he works, and he can sort of feel his dick through Richie’s cheek if he pushes his thumb in a little bit, which shouldn’t be hot, but it is. 

Eddie arches up into that wet heat, and exhales shakily. His hand comes up to run through Richie’s hair and Richie makes a humming noise that he can _ feel _, just as he pushes his fingers into just so, making Eddie thrust up into his mouth jerkily. Under another circumstance, Richie could take him apart like this. Richie could make him come his brains out like this, if he really took his time. Or...realistically, not much time at all. Actually...

“Okay! Okay, let’s–let’s go!” Eddie manages hastily, scrambling to pull Richie off of him, ignoring the twinge of heat that he feels as Richie wipes at his mouth with his sleeve. Still fully dressed–and that bothers Eddie in theory, because he wants to see him, but it changes the tone of all this in a way that’s suitable, somehow. Eddie bare underneath him; Richie just undressed enough to get his dick out, as he reaches down to get it slick with lube with a few cursory strokes.

“You want me to fuck you that badly, huh,” Richie says, and in the state that Eddie’s in, it takes him a second to realize that he’s parroting what Eddie had said earlier.

“Oh, fuck you.”

“No,” Richie says as he shuffles forward on his knees, nudging Eddie’s thighs apart. “Fuck _ you_.”

Richie does, or at least, he starts to. Eddie exhales shakily as Richie starts to push into him, forcing himself to relax, because if Richie’s fingers had been within the bounds of _ good _ too much, Richie’s dick is on the fringes of it, although that might make it better. Eddie’s hot from the inside; he’s hot from Richie on top of him, big and broad and engulfing him, neck bent so that his face is half pressed into the side of Eddie’s neck, the plastic frames of his glasses bumping into him awkwardly. 

It feels like an eternity before Richie’s buried in him to the hilt. Three days, at least. Maybe six months. Maybe a year in this hotel room. Eddie thinks, a little frantically, that he can’t breathe in too deeply, lest his lungs bump at the head of Richie’s dick as they expand, which is both faintly disgusting and flagrantly anatomically inaccurate. “Okay?” Richie mumbles, his voice strained, and Eddie nods stupidly until he realizes that Richie can’t see that. 

“Okay,” he rasps, and he feels Richie exhale against his neck. “Slowly.”

Richie pulls back a little to kiss him as he obeys, rocking into him shallowly at first. He’d used way too much lube–Eddie’s in a state from the waist down, but he doesn’t care much. It’s good sex already, Eddie has the great humilation of realizing, so quickly after they’ve started. The best sex he’s had, at least within recent memory. It’s a miracle he hasn’t come yet, embarrassingly quickly; he’s already oversensitive from how the head of his cock rubs up against Richie’s abdomen as he moves. 

And maybe Richie can tell. He presses a kiss to Eddie’s throat before breaking away to laugh a little breathlessly. “You like this, huh?”

“Yeah,” Eddie mumbles, too distracted to retain much of his dignity. Three hundred dollars for this, with a man he’d just met. He ought to pay _ Richie _ for this. Maybe he should, he thinks, as Richie starts to thrust in a little deeper, but _ slow _ and deep, so that Eddie feels every inch, and it’s maddening. 

And maybe he’s not the only one. Richie, he realizes, looks like something of a wreck. He’s not keeping things slow to torture Eddie; Eddie had said slow, and he’d obeyed, but he’s clearly restraining himself until Eddie gives the word. 

“Can I–” he manages, and Eddie nods. 

It’s not zero to one hundred. Richie’s not an animal; it’s more, and then a little more after that, harder, a little faster, little by little. The bed creaks underneath them; Eddie reaches up behind him to scrabble with the headboard, steadying himself as Richie fucks into him, jostling him back. His knees had been digging into Richie’s sides when he’d started, because Eddie is, generally speaking, a living, breathing, ball of tension, but it’s hard to retain that tension when Richie is taking him apart. 

Eddie fumbles for Richie’s glasses, takes them and tosses them somewhere across the room so that he can kiss him close, forehead bumping up against Richie’s clumsily, their teeth clicking, sloppy and desperate. Still with the taste of beer, from when they’d started, from _ why _ they’d started. He wonders, faintly, how he’s going to regret this in the morning, and then Richie angles into him just _ so, _and it drags something that sounds embarrassingly like a whimper from him, muffled into Richie’s mouth. 

“_Eddie_,” Richie says helplessly, and that’s all. And no one’s ever said Eddie’s name like that before. _ Richie _, Eddie mouths back, not quite able to muster up the coordination to say it, especially when Richie reaches down to grasp his cock. 

Richie jerks him slowly, a little clumsily, out of coordination with his thrusts, but four strokes in and Eddie’s nearly lost his mind. His hand slips down to the back of Richie’s neck, his fingertips digging into his skin, probably hard enough to bruise. Eddie shuts his eyes. He’s not going to come, he tells himself. Not just yet. He wants this to last longer, he doesn’t want it to stop– 

Eddie comes, leaving Richie’s fist dripping, a little bit of the excess pooling on Eddie’s abdomen, smearing against the backs of Richie’s knuckles, which is _ filthy_, objectively, but it’s the furthest thing from Eddie’s mind. And as Richie works him through it, Eddie can feel Richie’s thrusts get a little rougher, a little hastier, until finally he groans, burying himself into Eddie to the hilt as he drops his head to push his face into Eddie’s chest, with a few last jerky thrusts as he spills inside of him in pulses. 

They’re still for a long time after that. Eddie can feel Richie panting against his chest; he can hear his own ragged breaths, the hum of the air conditioning in the hotel as it switches on automatically. There are cracks in the ceiling, he notes, absently. They’d tried to speckle over them but they hadn’t done a very good job of it. 

After what feels like an eternity, Richie pulls out of him gingerly, and Eddie can feel a little bit of come leak out of him as he does it, dripping down his thighs. He makes a face, propping himself up a little to peer down at himself. Both of them are in desperate need of a shower–he’s sweaty all over, come all over his front, come _ in _him. Come on Richie’s hand. Come also–Eddie notes, with a mean sort of satisfaction–on Richie’s horrible shirt. 

But he doesn’t feel _ disgusting _, per se. Or if he is...he feels pleasantly disgusting. Exhausted disgusting. Sated disgusting.

“Lemme see,” Richie says, quietly, and Eddie doesn’t get what he means until he reaches down to push Eddie’s leg up a little, grasping him so he can look. He drags a finger through the mess dripping down Eddie’s thighs, and, on an impulse, pushes it back into him lazily. 

“Nnh,” Eddie manages, squirming uncomfortably, ignoring how that somehow–and inexplicably, so soon after coming–manages to go straight to his dick. _ You’ve had enough_, he tells it, sternly. “Okay. _ Jesus_.”

Richie flashes him a grin but withdraws his fingers and rolls off of him finally, collapsing at his side. There’s another silence. 

“Five stars,” he says, finally. 

“What?”

“Your Yelp review.”

Eddie’s too tired to shoot him a glare. He’s conserving his energy, presently, so that he can get up and take a shower, because this will require walking and not falling over. Falling in the shower, in fact, is one of the leading causes of severe injuries within the household. “Thank you,” he says finally. 

Richie smiles. Eddie likes the way he looks when he smiles, especially when he’s looking at him when he does it, and he can’t help but return it, stupidly, before he has to look away. “Where the fuck are my glasses?” Richie wonders. 

“Around,” Eddie says, vaguely and mysteriously. He’s pretty sure they landed somewhere within the direction of the chair that Richie’s jacket is presently becoming wrinkled on. He closes his eyes, just for a second, and sleeps for seven hours. 

***

Eddie gets up at five, takes a long shower, and dresses. Richie’s still there in the bed, which doesn’t quite fit into the frame of this Pretty Woman thing they’d been doing, but Eddie’s fine with it, actually. At some point during the night he’d covered the two of them with blankets, turned out the lights, and dressed down to his boxers, not in that order. The rest of his clothes had joined his jacket on the chair, around where his glasses–he can see now–_had _landed. 

Once Eddie is dressed, he retrieves them from the floor–just so that they don’t get stepped on–and sets them on the desk by the window. 

Before he leaves, he tucks his business card into the peephole of the door, where Richie won’t be able to miss it. He leaves him in the bed and goes back home, where he carefully counts out the money in his pocket–two hundred and ten dollars, and some change–and stows it away, where he won’t look at it again unless he has to, in his filing cabinet within the manila envelope with his tax returns from 2011. He dresses in fresh clothes for work and heads into the office.

Richie doesn’t call for a week. 

***

It’s not like the hurt has faded from his mind completely, but it’s started to. He’s able to think about other things–it’s just that his night with Richie returns to him in flashes. He still lies awake at night and tries to tally up the things he’d done wrong–where, precisely, he’d erred–but he figures that will stop eventually. 

In fact, right now, at four PM on a Friday, Richie’s the last thing on his mind. He’s got the new junior manager in his office, Colin something. He’s stupid, but he’s young and green, so Eddie will give him a few weeks before he decides to hate him formally. 

“So,” Colin says cautiously, eyes fixed on Eddie’s face. “I should...focus on the Lilley account?”

“That’s not what I said, Colin,” Eddie says, and he _ thinks _ he says it pleasantly, but something like terror flashes across Colin’s face, so maybe not. “I _ said _ that we’re off track with the Lilley account but we’ve got to prioritize with Helen out on leave. We can circle back with them in the next quarter. As I’ve explained–three times–we’ve got to–”

Eddie’s interrupted by the shrill beeping of the intercom function on his phone. Colin all but leaps up from his chair and Eddie frowns at him, holding up his hand: _ stay_. 

Reluctantly, Colin sinks back into his seat. 

“I have a Mr. Tozier for you on line two, Eddie,” Eddie’s assistant says, and Eddie mulls that over. Tozier. He’s great with names, something that’s served him well in the business world, but he’s drawing a blank. The Stafford account, maybe? 

No. Now that he thinks about it, he’s pretty sure it’s the new guy from Hasser. His name had started with a T. He’d been meaning to schedule some face time, and he’d said it like that, in that kind of obnoxious corporate doublespeak. 

“I can come back,” Colin offers, hopefully. 

“No. This’ll be quick,” Eddie says dismissively, much to Colin’s visible disappointment. He picks up the phone, swiveling a little to peer out the window as he speaks. “Edward Kaspbrak speaking.”

“Eddie!” Richie says, and Eddie promptly drops the phone. 

“Oh!” Colin exclaims, reaching for it, and Eddie bats him away to pick it up, frantically. 

“I _ got _ it,” he hisses, before dropping back into his professional voice. “Hi! _ So _ great to hear from you.”

“What the fuck just happened? It sounded like a bomb went off.”

Eddie’s heart pounds in his chest. The last time he’d heard that voice he’d been murmuring _ good night _ to him; that had returned to him over the course of the past few days, the tactile sensation of Richie pulling the blankets over him too, ensuring that he would be warm. “You too. Of course. I heard that from Patrick over in finance, actually, congrats.”

“What?”

Eddie glances at Colin cautiously. “I’m glad you have my office line. Let me just make sure you have my cell in case I have to step away–you have it, right?”

“Oh, shit. Sorry.” Richie catches on quick, and he doesn’t sound sorry–in fact, he sounds delighted. “Yeah, I tried it, you didn’t answer. Do you have someone in your office?”

Eddie hasn’t looked at his cell in hours. “Well, I think I’m booked up, unfortunately,” he says, before mouthing a _ sorry _ at Colin. Colin does not take this as his hint to leave, to Eddie’s great disappointment. 

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call before–I’ve had some work stuff, but. I can’t, uh. Stop thinking about you, really? I went to the bar Thursday, but you weren’t there.”

Eddie’s forty years old, and that shouldn’t make his heart skip a beat like it does, _ I can’t stop thinking about you_, like they’re teenagers. “Oh, yeah. We’ve been swamped here with quarter close.

“Okay. That’s fine. I think I ought to make this quick. I’ll call you after work, probably,” Richie says. It sounds like he’s outside, and Eddie wonders where he is. What his life is like, really, although he’s wondered about that plenty over the course of the past week, until it hurt too much to think about. He cradles the phone to his shoulder. “Hey. Just one last question, I’m curious. Does the person in the office know that you moonlight as a h–”

“I think your connection, it’s–hello?” Eddie asks, loudly, drowning out whatever it is that Richie had been going to say, although he could probably guess. “Mr. Tozier? Are you there?”

“Okay! Okay,” Richie laughs, and Eddie cracks a smile before he can stop himself. “That’s all. We’ll figure something out, I’ll call you after work. Maybe this weekend.”

“I can hear you now. That sounds great, we’ll put it on the calendar,” Eddie says, and then something else occurs to him–an impulsive, intrusive thought, one that he can’t quite catch before it escapes him. “I’m buying next time, though.”

There’s a pause. Too long of a pause eventually, and Eddie wonders if Richie had heard him, if he’d understood what he’d meant, before he finally hears his voice again. A little hoarse, unless he’s imagining things. “Yeah?” 

“Talk to you later. Bye.” Eddie says it in a rush–_talktoyoulaterbye,_ and Richie barely gets out his own _ bye _ before Eddie is promptly hanging up, and it’s done. He stills, hand on the phone, as the weight of the conversation they’d had sinks in. He can’t remember what he’d been talking about with Colin before it. He couldn’t possibly. It’s a beautiful day, actually. Maybe he ought to get outside, if the pollen count is okay. 

“Tozier,” Colin says, slowly, breaking the silence. Eddie’s reminded that he isn’t alone here, and he releases the phone hastily, glancing up at Colin. The Stafford account, he reminds himself. No. The _ Lilley _account. “Huh. Do you think he’s related to that comedian?”

Eddie stares at him blankly. “What comedian?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and there we have it! Title taken from "Everyman Needs A Companion" by Father John Misty. Find me on twitter at foxglovves!


End file.
